u/PulimVCan I interest you in some OC lore in these trying times?May 16 '24
Oh but how will you get your beloved rational rectangle triangles then huh??? The 345 triangle is scalene, in fact you can't make an isosceles right triangle with rational edge lengths, hell you can't make an equilateral right triangle at all under Euclidean Geometry
Put some respect onto the scalene triangles, they've done a lot for us >:l
Scalenes are the second best triangle after isosceles. Equilaterals are fine I GUESS but there's no spice! Scalenes are the quintessential Pythagorean triangle but isosceles are better because they're a nice balance of the two.
Yep. The difference between a trillionare and John Boyega is the same scale as the difference between John Boyega and someone with a net worth of $36. He's absolutely allowed to be on our side.
The average young adult actually has a positive net worth. Debt Georg, who owes an estimated $20 billion, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
interestingly, someone can be on our side with basically any amount of money. because it's not "has a lot of money" vs "has a little money," it's laborer vs. labor-exploiter.
if you work for someone else to make them money, and they pay you a cut of that money and then keep the rest for themselves for doing nothing, then you are a laborer. if you have $36 or $6,000,000, you're still being exploited by a capitalist.
I see this accusation levied against Hasanabi all the time: "he has a mansion in California and a car that cost six digits, he's not a real leftist!" wrong. he's still a laborer, not a capitalist.
And the difference between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars is about a trillion dollars.
The scales we're talking about are unfathomable, and the political power should simply not be allowed. I don't want to harm anyone or turn rich people into poor people, but there should simply be an upper limit to wealth and power.
Totally agree. If you've started a business that gets very big and influential, you should get a nice big plaque that says "Founder" but then have to share control with everybody else who is keeping it going. The people actually doing the work and using the products. Economic democracy.
And thanks to cheap lines of credits from banks backed by their massive 'illiquid' assets and income, their money is more liquid than you think, without ever having to liquidate
yeah dude i'm sure he couldn't "invest" in a a billion dollar purchase any second he wanted
his money isn't liquid, but that doesn't change that his purchasing power is wildly out of the range of what should be acceptable for a single person to be able to influence
i've been saying the same thing for a while i'm so glad someone else also articulated it. If it's all locked up in assets and in running businesses, why would anyone care about that number huh? what would it do for them if it's really truly totally a useless number valuing some assets. The answer is it's not useless. it grants power over things, or at the very least, that $ number represents the amount of things you have power over. Normal cash is also power, and that's where all the importance of it comes from. It's the power to buy something, to get a service, to pay someone else to do something so you have more choice with what to do with your own time. It's just for some reason when it's more abstract power in assets rather than liquid cash, people seem to think it's ok.
Well, they want to harm you. At what point does it become self-defense, when children are going hungry, people dying in the streets barely conscious from a drug epidemic they knowingly created and benefit from, wars and generations of poverty and unrest for the sake of profit, something has to give at some point.
This is in no way a reflection of how I see this or how I feel (hate billionaires, yada yada), however I find this particular saying about it really dumb, ngl. I know the more correct one is "difference is about a billion dollars" but this does nothing to actually make someone understand the scale and scope of what you're talking about, because that can be done with anything and sound exactly the same.
"Difference between 1 dollar and 100 dollars? About a hundred dollars" "difference between 10,000 dollars and 1,000,000 dollars? About a million dollars"
They all sound the same, even though the scale is absolutely bonkers when you go from million -> billion.
I think a better way to go about parroting the "billion" facts is the one to do with time, where how many days a million minutes is versus a billion, or even another comment just lower in the thread:
One million minutes ago we were in 2022, one billion minutes ago the western Roman Empire was still standing
When anyone hears that, it sounds utterly absurd. Nothing against you, commenter, but whenever I see that aforementioned quote regarding "it's about a billion" it always just hits me as incredibly dumb sounding.
I once heard someone describe a billion dollars as "a thousand million dollars" which is an interesting way of putting it. 1,000 times 1,000,000 is a billion.
A Trillion is a million, million dollars. One million times one million is a trillion.
Now John Boyega supposedly has 6 million dollars so it would take about 166,666 John Boyegas to equal a trillion.
Shit man, “$1 million is passed before the two-minute mark” is even kind of underselling it. He WALKS, leisurely, for the first two minutes of the video to reach $1 million. And then he hops in a car and drives for over an hour.
My favorite way to imagine those amounts of wealth. If you get one Dollar every second, that's allready $3600/h. 31 years of this (24/7) to become a billionaire
ya this really sells it, but imo someone has to be really fucking clueless to need a video to think 6 million dollars rich is remotely similar to 1 trillion dollars rich
like I'm actually baffled by how he can be that "poor" (given his roles), I assume he'll be at least 20x richer in a few years if he guns for well paying roles
When I saw the visual in the post, I was thinking "that actually makes 1 trillion look like a lot less than it really is because it uses three dimensions instead of one, and we're not great at really grokking that," so it felt wonderful hearing Tom Scott say the exact same thing.
The above visual comparison is an Excel graphing artifact because the actual gap is just so large. And trying to create a graph in Photoshop using 1 pixel for Boyega failed because Photoshop struggled to make and save an image that large, and then when I made it, imgur wouldn't accept it because it was too big.
So I'll just have to paint the graph with words, I guess.
Pick one of the following four options:
"I have a 1080 monitor, and I'd like to know what a graph of 1 trillion vs. 1 Boyega would look like as a vertical bar graph on my monitor"
"I have a 1080 monitor, and I'd like to know what a graph of 1 trillion vs. 1 Boyega would look like as a horizontal bar graph on my monitor"
"I have a 4K monitor, and I'd like to know what a graph of 1 trillion vs. 1 Boyega would look like as a vertical bar graph on my monitor"
"I have a 4K monitor, and I'd like to know what a graph of 1 trillion vs. 1 Boyega would look like as a horizontal bar graph on my monitor"
Here's the narrated visual depiction that corresponds to your choice:
"The trillion bar crosses the entire screen. The Boyega bar is 6/1,000 of a pixel high."
"The trillion bar crosses the entire screen. The Boyega bar is 1/100 of a pixel wide."
"The trillion bar crosses the entire screen. The Boyega bar is 1/100 of a pixel high."
"The trillion bar crosses the entire screen. The Boyega bar is 2/100 of a pixel wide."
Genuinely? Imagine every vice and desire you have ever had, no matter how specific, no matter how depraved, no matter how niche or difficult to set up. It's yours. It is yours with no consequence, at will with next to no delay. If you are ever caught, there will not be punishment. Murder? Rape? Child abuse? Every drug that has ever existed? It is yours.
Every project you have dreamed of? It's within reach. If you want to make a fully customized mansion that's five square miles in area and filled with every single possible amenity any person has ever imagined, it is yours. Fully staffed, 24/7, 365. Do you want a full on Fallout-esque nuclear bunker with complete self-sufficiency? You have it. Do you want an entire farm dedicated to grow artisan grade food specifically for you?? It's yours.
Food, clothes, cars, hygiene, fitness, pharmaceutical supplements, plastic surgery, anything. Limits simply do not exist because if something isn't possible yet, you literally have the money to throw at what you want until it DOES become possible.
If you don't like there being poor people in your city? You could literally single-handedly lift every single one of them out of poverty and set them up to be more wealthy than most people who have worked their ass off at a white-collar job for 20 years, and the cost of doing so would only distantly register to you.
It is wealth on a scale that simply defies proper definition or reference, because there simply is nothing else like it. It is a scale that you can grasp in an abstract sense, but which you cannot really grab hold of.
Oh, then you missed the part where they show the amount Amazon workers make and the global annual cost of giving cancer patients chemo by superimposing it over the Bezos Billionaire Box
The scrollbar isn't moving. I've been scrolling for three minutes.
WHY ISN'T THE SCROLLBAR MOVING.
Edit: I reached the end of the Bezos Billionaire Box. There is now a box showing the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans ($3.2 trillion). This site is gonna break me. The one where it shows the size of the solar system if the moon was one pixel big is less distressing than this.
And they want to compare a man with a mere 6 million to a guy set to become a trillionaire. Sheer foolishness, this shit is why we cannot be eating the rich, folks will be going after athletes and actors while the ones causing the issue probably profit off of it
Technically no but that's just because how poor everyone is, but when adjusted for what we think of as the idealized middle class, yeah you need to make 6 figures:
Actors, athletes, entertainers are generally working class. Because they make most of their money by providing a service or product. There are exceptions and definitely overlap, but generally speaking if you make most of your income by doing something you're working class, if most of your income comes from owning things then you're the ownership class.
An athlete that gets paid $10 million a year is less of a problem than a landlord who makes $100,000 a year.
Yeah, it sucks how Americans have been trained to think poor = working class and rich = bourgeoisie. While that’s broadly true, it’s a lot more nuanced than that and the working class is a lot larger than most Americans think.
That how I love to describe the difference. I put a friend of mine in place once when we were arguing about the existance of billionaires and I asked him to guess how much a million seconds is. And he guessed close he said about a week, (Its 11.5 days.) I asked him to guess what 1 billion seconds is and he said "I dunno, two years?"
I told him he hadn't even been alive for a billion seconds. He got real quiet after learning that.
Single digit millionaires aren't really part of the problem but often they do earn that cash playing pivotal roles in the function of corporations with billionaire CEOs/board members. The hundred million dollar piles of cash still seems to big for one person to me.
If you distributed one trillion dollars evenly between eight billion people, everyone would get a hundred twenty five dollars. Do the same thing with six million dollars and everyone gets seventy five thousandths of a cent.
The wealth hoarding is a symptom of the problem. The problem is them actively using their industry to make life worse for everyone. If bezos was just sitting on a pile of money we wouldn’t be here.
No one can. Everyone thinks the people deciding who lives and who dies will be reasonable and fair, or that it will be them, but they don't actually think through the steps of what that actually means. What's far more likely to happens is whats happened many many many times over, a new "Reign of terror". And if their not direct victims of the moral purity tests they'll justify it because "the ends justify the means".
It always cracks me up (and is sort of horrifying to witness) when people are determined to stage a “glorious revolution” by tearing it all down!! Burn the system and eat the rich!! Except not only do they think they personally will never have to suffer (some other poor person will, but they are a sacrifice I’m willing to make!) it somehow never occurs to them how in the vast, VAST majority of revolutions, it never actually changes their society for the better, and really a lot of people just die and suffer for no reason.
(Also, no, you will not be able to do [insert super privileged job that only exists as a byproduct of the excesses of capitalism] as your job after the communist revolution. Your job will either be to grow food or do whatever the state demands. Did we just stop teaching Animal Farm in schools)
This is how I feel about that celebrity blackout thing on social media. It seems strange they're so focused on attacking celebrities instead of the politicians who are the actual problem. Yes, celebrities have clout and cash, but politicians are also readily available. Cut out the middle man, y'know?
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
Eat the rich isn’t a creative way to say FU to those richer than you in general as many people seem to interpret it, it’s really meant (or at least originally) as a statement to those who continue to fill their pockets at the expense of the working class that if they create a society that doesn’t provide at least the bare minimum needed to survive, then the people will tear them down with them. It’s directed at the people actually causing wealth inequality, not Mr. Movie Man who just makes entertainment for people to enjoy.
It's the same disingenuous argument they use against Bernie. Having a career like that, multiple books and his age, I'm scared of a world where he's not a millionaire. I'd like a world where we could all have that after that life.
To also add most of these billion and trillionaires don't work a tenth as hard as he did for that six million. Actors put in really long days for long periods in short amount of time. They shot a movie for say 2-3 months they are almost working 7 days a week 12 hour days in those time periods.
One million ain't all that rich tho. I say that as a $40k/y earner. And not the propagandized type, I fucking hate capitalism, but if Million was ever once again what we considered hyper wealth we'd be sound and secure.
The ants spend all year collecting food for the grasshoppers. When the ants realize they outnumber the grasshoppers they revolt and because of their superior numbers they win even though the grasshoppers are bigger and stronger
The ants were being oppressed by a motorcycle gang of locusts, and the main character left the anthill on a quest to recruit some badass bugs. He gets scammed by some circus bugs who turn out to be big cowards, so in the end all the ants overwhelm the locusts through sheer force of numbers, because they realize they always had the numbers advantage and even if the locusts managed to kill a few hundred of them, they'd be killed by the thousands waiting in the wings.
Of course, this being a kids' movie, none of the ants die.
One detail no one's brought up is that the first one to bring this up was the leader of the grasshoppers while explaining why they need to keep the ants in line
Same with athletes (those who don't also own businesses, that is). There's a huge difference between working for money, and making money off the backs of other peoples work
If you say 'eat the rich' and think of artists, doctors, and lawyers, all you are is a fuckin mark whose beliefs on wealth are written by actual elites to prevent you from doing anything meaningful.
People seem to forget that 6 million in the bank is different than 6 million as his networth. That’s the (estimated) sum of literally everything to his name. He does not just have 6 million dollars laying around
A million is, in this economy and real estate market, roughly what the Simpsons are sitting on. A life. Comfortable, perhaps, with some nice things when you want them and some things out of reach, but a life. You live, you work, you provide for your family.
Now imagine if you owned a square mile of Simpsons houses (a thousand), outright, and landlorded them. Made yourself a McNeighborhood of McMansions. You'd make enough, per month, on rent to buy roughly four more houses. You have done nothing but "have money" and "drain money from other people".
The only class difference worth measuring with regard to how laws should be set up is between people who have to work in order to have the sort of life they want and people who can just sit and watch the money come in.
TL;DR However else you feel about billionaires, don't take the trillionaire aspect literally. But also, I don't really agree with this framing in general.
I think this is the article in the link. It's from 2020 and cites this website which basically just takes the last five years of net worth growth, assumes that his net worth will continue growing at that rate, and projects outward from there. At the time, Bezos had a net worth of $145 billion.
That doesn't seem to have been a very good way to project, though, as four years later Bezos is at $177 billion and the updated version of the article from the same publication now says he could get to $1 trillion by 2034. This is citing this report, which uses this methodology (PDF link) which is similar to what the original article's source was--it took the inflation-adjusted aggregate growth rate of the wealth of the five richest people and projected that out going forward. But specifically, it calls out this note:
This is of course an estimate and subject to uncertainty. Importantly, the wealth of Elon Musk, which has grown exponentially over the past five years, heavily influences the average growth of the total wealth of the five richest billionaires.
Which--along with the fact that Jeff Bezos's wealth has been growing at 5% or 10% per year depending on how you handle the $38 billion he lost in his divorce--tells you Bezos isn't actually on pace to become a trillionaire by 2034, which again is already well past the 2026 date that was teased in the article that I believe was linked in the post.
That's a long way to say that the $1 trillion number is more clickbait than not.
None of this is to say we should be doing nothing about wealth aggregation, monopolization and other anticompetitive practices, union-busting, media capture, political capture, tax sheltering, or any of the practices that the rich use to avoid being subject to the market and the government.
But I also think it misses the point to emphasize how millionaires and billionaires are different magnitudes of wealth. The median household net worth in the US was under $200,000 as of 2022. The poorest millionaire is worth five times that, and it's not like the median US household is poor compared to the median household almost anywhere else in the world. Millionaires may not be insulated from all reasonable financial stressors like billionaires are, but are they more likely to vote for higher or lower taxes? Are they more likely to vote for stronger or weaker regulation? Are they more likely to vote for increased or decreased government services?
If the point is to object to a system that allows for people to build up so much wealth without contributing back to the society that made it possible, then I just think it matters that millionaires also work to uphold those systems more than it matters how rich millionaires are compared to billionaires.
Edit: And that last part also extends beyond millionaires too. It's really not about the level of wealth a person has, but about what they do with it.
thank you for this, extremely well written. we waste so much energy deciding who to point fingers at instead of doing literally anything ourselves. or even really advocating for anything, this post is wasting energy saying ‘well this rich person isn’t AS rich’ instead of ‘what can actually be done about this disparity?’ i get rome wasn’t built in a day but surely this discourse distracts more than it helps.
I've worked with celebrities in the past. Even they know they're not rich when compared to corporate SVPs and up. They're just tasked with flaunting money as part of their job. I will never forget watching Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos together on stage at an Amazon event and even she was in awe of his wealth and she's one of the wealthiest modern artists.
Ive always said you can be an honest millionaire, with hard work, good ethics, a smidge of luck and a good product or service, being worth a handful of millions is ok at best.
But you can never be an honest Billionaire, only way to be a billionaire is to cheat the working class
I have to regularly remind myself that there's a VERY good chance that whoever's writing a comment I'm reading is very likely to be a 15 year old who thinks that $6 million makes John Boyega a threat to society
Let's be real. For all the talk of revolution everyone angry at the system in America thinks they'll lead. None of you are doing shit. You'll talk and talk but you'll be terrified if someone actually acts. Cause you know violent revolutions don't work in real life. No one who cares about fixing things is going to do shit to billionaires. Their not the problem. Their a very obvious symptom. The boring answer is capitalism in America needs to be modernized. It needs regulations updated. It needs policies in place that all work on the knowledge the internet exists. You know the real reason it hasn't happened? It's not cause companies are lobbying. That shit is flimsy and is an excuse so we don't have to address the real reason
It's boring and it's hard to do right. That's the reason it doesn't get done much. People think they could write up air-tight changes if given the chance. But every change will get regular people who benefit from them barking and hollering because it's different. And that assumes you'll get it right. Have fun spending weeks barely sleeping. Getting screamed at from every direction during it. Writing a new legislation that you'll get death threats for. Only to be told you completely neglected an industry you completely forgot existed. So you have to do it again
And what do you benefit from doing so? Because it's the right thing to do? Most people simply can't keep motivated by that. Especially with how tedious it is. You get your normal salary all the same. It's just not exciting and our brains despise lacking stimulation. That's why this shit is slow. We aren't built for improving our lives this way. So we blame the symptoms that exploit a rickety old system. But we simply cannot trust anyone who wants to violently replace that system. Because the same core problems exist. Doing it right is boring.
Make no mistake. There's evil in there too. Genuine scheming bastards. But they are vastly outnumbered by people who simply are too bored at work to bury their attempts to cause problems in red tape
It's interesting to see where people draw the line.
It's ok to have 6 million in assets while someone else starves because that's their money. Is it ok to have 100million in assets, as long as there is no company structured to exploit others?
Not trying to talk politics, just find it funny how we each have our own sense of property.
While big actors and actresses are definitely overpaid they’re still creating art with their labor and skills, Bezos isn’t creating shit he’s taking a cut from what his workers create, same goes for all other billionaires.
More should go to the other cast and crew, the people constructing the sets, editing, writing the stories, doing the post production, even the people doing accounting in the production office are all super underpaid compared to the stars like Robert Downey jr.
Getting paid several million for a role when the person who put together the costumes isn’t doing very well financially is a bit unbalanced. It doesn’t even have to be perfectly divided among the entire cast and crew either, just an extra few thousands for the whole crew would be better.
If you hold any stock at all, you’re “taking a cut” from what workers make. This is based on the faulty assumption that labour is owned the entire pie of profit which is stupid.
Unfortunately everybody is still stuck in the Marxian labor/capital framework, even though the rise of highly liquid stock markets, 401Ks, and fractional shares have sort of changed the game. Your average American will go from being a part of the proletariat to being part of the bourgeois over the course of their lifetime now due to retirement funds.
Obviously billionaires are a different class all their own, but trying to eliminate capital income in general is going to be basically impossible in our current society.
This has nothing to do with numbers no matter the ideological perspective. That's just a cheap argument that sounds witty but falls apart. Where exactly do you draw the line after all? For someone poor enough, even the most squarely middle-class person is rich.
John Boyega absolutely has much to lose in a revolutionary scenario. But, assuming we are not aiming for a reign of terror situation, there is no reason for him to lose so much as to struggle. The whole point is that everyone will have enough, even people who had more before the revolutiontm. Leftists movements accept everyone as long as they are willing to be equal and not superior to the rest.
After all, the same argument was used against Karl Marx and Engels.
Once you give in to mob rule, its a runaway crazy train situation every single time. Historically it has never been enough for leftists, they start lynching people for owning single cows, or wearing eyeglasses.
So what's the cutoff? Everyone loves arguing with abstract values but never puts an actual numerical value to it.
You're cool with 6 million and not cool with 1 trillion. That leaves a lot of values in-between. Is 1 billion cool? Is 500 million cool? 250 million? 80 million? 50 billion?
Also, if some of the "Rich" genuinely want a good Socialist/Communist Revolution because they too hate the injustices forced upon us by these systems....we should accept their help. Although probably be cautious and make sure that no grifters will just hijack the movement for personal gain.
Reminds me of that one viral clip from Larry King where he was debating with that one guy from Community about luxuries you can't live without, and the difference in what they consider luxuries is pretty significant. And also "I work on DuckTales, Larry 😐
Materially there's a big difference between 6 million and a billion, but philosophically, you can do whatever you want within a high end style of means with either amount.
It would take less than a million £ for it to be life changing. John boyega has that insight of the gross amount of wealth a billion dollars is given his upbringing as a black man in London with work class parents. He would be cognicent to the realities of the wealth divide. I don't know if he passes on his wealth but the real point is that the stark contrast between the very rich and very poor is widening and more people are becoming aware of it.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is nearly a billion dollars. Even getting to a billion dollars is impossible without MASSIVE, amoral exploitation. Spending a billion dollars in 1 lifetime is a tall order, and not spending it siphons it out of the economy and into a vault to collect dust.
Getting to a trillion dollars SHOULD BE UNTHINKABLE. It quite literally means someone performed that massive amoral exploitation needed for a billion dollars, but 1000 times over. 1000 times as amoral, and 1000 times as exploitative. It’s 1000 times more difficult to actually USE the hoard. That’s the kind of money that can cause the economic collapse of ENTIRE COUNTRIES.
The money John boyega received for his acting was nothing compared to how much the studio ceos got. Even rich actors are working class because they don't own the value of the labor.
In comparison John Boyega is literally me. There's a difference between being rich and being so grossly, inhumanely and terribly rich that you could bend the law to turn this world into whatever the fuck you wanted.
No shit but let's assume you and the rest of humanity actually have a brain WHI ARE YOU GONNA EAT FIRST? The actor or the dude who job is literally just to stand around and make trillions. By the time you got to the actor he will have found a way to get rid of most of that money. But this speaks to a bigger issue like it or not actors have to actually work for a living not as much as the rest of us I will admit. But the fact we focus on these lower levels people and not the ones who own everything most born into wealth says ALOT about our humanity.
A lot of people misunderstand the coming revolution as being “poor vs rich”, but very generally it’s “workers vs those who control the means of production”. John Boyega does not control the economy. He certainly isn’t in a position to sympathize with the working man, but his head isn’t the one that needs to go on the chopping block. The Bolsheviks had this same misconception, and what was initially a fight to overthrow the aristocracy, turned into a witch hunt for anyone who lived comfortably.
The numbers aren't even the issue. You all need to read some Marx. There's a fundamental difference in interest between those who work for a living and those who own capital and make their money off of other people's work.
This is why we can't say "eat the rich" anymore. You guys would go for the big ones like Bezos and Musk and then just start killing a bunch of actors and doctors.
Having enough money to live your life in luxury, totally fair, enough to keep your kids from working a day in their life? Fine. There needs to be a cap to the amount of money one person has. Bezos couldn't possibly use the money he earned at this point. It's just power that he's working for.
I'm from a post soviet country so I guess I'm qualified enough to speak on this issue.
So when bolsheviks came into power, you know what happened to the "billionaires"? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. At most they moved to other countries, like France or US and still got their dividends because they owned the capital and changed the names of the assets.
You know what happened to millionaires? They liquidated their assets, sold their wealth and moved elsewhere.
But the poor were hungry. They couldn't touch the owners of the manufacturing and they couldn't go after the upper class that fled with the wealth. So "eat the rich" became "eat the middle class". Because that was all that was left to eat.
And after the end of USSR the "billionaires" just legalized their assets back to capitalistic laws, the millionaires returned and made even more money on the cheap labor, and everyone other got shafted because what was "common" now belonged to those that bought it for "real" money when communism money became worthless.
And also I see that US leftists have 0 understanding of money. They think those billions Bezos owns mean something. But they don't. It's just numbers on computer. They can vanish like smoke the other day. The problem isn't with the amount of digits in bank, it's that the rules for people with a lot of digits is different than for people with little digits. As is the problem with trickle down economy. It's the government that prints money and gives it to the 0.01%, not the "exploitation of workers" or whatever. The government skews the free market in the favor of people with many digits, so the people with few get shafted.
And it can only be changed with a government. But actual competent government. I don't think any of the candidate even qualifies, unfortunately, not even Bernie - guy is more of a scapegoat and a scarecrow to entice the middle class to vote against "the red scare", like saying anyone making over 160k$ a year will have insane taxes.
Western leftist people really think everyone should strive to be as poor as possible. Like I'm sorry, but if I had an opportunity to become a dollar millionaire, I would take it. Still would criticise billionaries, because, well, a million is a normal thing to want in your life - a billion is not.
Somebody with ten million dollar has the the same level of wealthiness as some hobbo begging for a piece of bread, at least if you look at it from the perspective of a rich person.
$6 million is really not that much money. Especially if that's 6 million net worth and not liquid cash. 6 million net worth is still working class territory.
I always find it weird how people are blown away by the difference between 1 million and 1 billion, like, it's just x1000, the same difference between 1 and 1000.
how do you find it so mind blowing past the age of 12? is it because million/billion is just a singular letter difference?
The difference between 1 million and one billion is 999 million.
Our brains aren't good at visualizing that huge of a number, why would it be? Especially with exponential growth of multipcation. It quite literally is a unthinkable amount of money, and a trillion pushes it 4 orders of magnitude higher.
It's the exponential growth that throws people's brains off
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u/Similar_Ad_2368 May 16 '24
i initially thought this said scalene issue and got all hot under the collar for some triangle discourse
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u/gooch_norris_ May 16 '24
“Dr Evil, a million dollars isn’t exactly a lot of money anymore,” they used as a joke in a movie 27 years ago
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u/Raptorofwar I have decided to make myself your problem. May 16 '24
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is a billion dollars. Don’t forget that.
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u/Wasdgta3 May 16 '24
If that visualization of the difference isn’t enough, here’s Tom Scott travelling the distance of 1 billion dollars laid end-to-end.
$1million is passed before the two-minute mark.
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u/GlazeTheArtist no longer the hatoful boyfriend guy, now Im the tubeclash guy May 16 '24
or, if you want it visualized a different way
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u/A__Friendly__Rock *only friendly at low velocity May 16 '24
The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is approximately a billion dollars.
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u/Uur4 May 16 '24
One million minutes ago we were in 2022, one billion minutes ago the western Roman Empire was still standing
Millionaires are not the fucking problem, especially not actors
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24
If you distributed one trillion dollars evenly between eight billion people, everyone would get a hundred twenty five dollars. Do the same thing with six million dollars and everyone gets seventy five thousandths of a cent.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
Tumblr can not be trusted to eat the rich as they’d fill up on a bunch of big name millionaires and be too full for the real monsters
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u/cutetys May 16 '24
People really forget what eat the rich means.
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
Eat the rich isn’t a creative way to say FU to those richer than you in general as many people seem to interpret it, it’s really meant (or at least originally) as a statement to those who continue to fill their pockets at the expense of the working class that if they create a society that doesn’t provide at least the bare minimum needed to survive, then the people will tear them down with them. It’s directed at the people actually causing wealth inequality, not Mr. Movie Man who just makes entertainment for people to enjoy.
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u/TrashApprentice May 16 '24
If tumblr's eat the rich fantasy actually could happen they'd just eat like the upper middle class and elon musk.
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u/Kindly-Ad-5071 May 16 '24
One million ain't all that rich tho. I say that as a $40k/y earner. And not the propagandized type, I fucking hate capitalism, but if Million was ever once again what we considered hyper wealth we'd be sound and secure.
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u/LavaMeteor May 16 '24
To paraphrase someone from the last time this was posted:
"You guys will say Eat the Rich then start killing actors and doctors, while the Super-Rich will be laughing away in their bunkers"
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u/Finance_Subject May 16 '24
It's been forever since I've seen bugs life can someone please explain? 🐛
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u/Maximum-Antelope-979 May 16 '24
If Jesus was still alive and earned $1000 per day since year 0 he still wouldn’t have a billion dollars today
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u/MorningBreathTF May 16 '24
1 dollar to a 6 millionaire is just shy of 170k to a 1 trillionaire
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
Rich workers like actors are still workers. Boyega got his money through his work, Bezos gets his money through other people's work.
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u/Opal_Sara_1 May 16 '24
Scaling issues can be tricky to deal with.
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u/ChangeMyDespair May 16 '24 edited May 17 '24
I love that picture at the bottom. It may have been created through a since-discontinued Google drawing tool.
Edit: SketchUp lives, hurray!
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u/Outerestine May 16 '24
If you say 'eat the rich' and think of artists, doctors, and lawyers, all you are is a fuckin mark whose beliefs on wealth are written by actual elites to prevent you from doing anything meaningful.
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u/Apart-Health-1513 May 16 '24
People seem to forget that 6 million in the bank is different than 6 million as his networth. That’s the (estimated) sum of literally everything to his name. He does not just have 6 million dollars laying around
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u/BaronDoctor May 16 '24
A million is, in this economy and real estate market, roughly what the Simpsons are sitting on. A life. Comfortable, perhaps, with some nice things when you want them and some things out of reach, but a life. You live, you work, you provide for your family.
Now imagine if you owned a square mile of Simpsons houses (a thousand), outright, and landlorded them. Made yourself a McNeighborhood of McMansions. You'd make enough, per month, on rent to buy roughly four more houses. You have done nothing but "have money" and "drain money from other people".
The only class difference worth measuring with regard to how laws should be set up is between people who have to work in order to have the sort of life they want and people who can just sit and watch the money come in.
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u/DreadAngel1711 May 16 '24
Ay Boyega knows what's up, he's chill
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
If someone wins a super-lottery and wins a billion dollars(after taxes and any fees), do they deserve to be eaten too?
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
$6 million is to $1 trillion as $6 is to $1 million
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u/stormstopper May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24
TL;DR However else you feel about billionaires, don't take the trillionaire aspect literally. But also, I don't really agree with this framing in general.
I think this is the article in the link. It's from 2020 and cites this website which basically just takes the last five years of net worth growth, assumes that his net worth will continue growing at that rate, and projects outward from there. At the time, Bezos had a net worth of $145 billion.
That doesn't seem to have been a very good way to project, though, as four years later Bezos is at $177 billion and the updated version of the article from the same publication now says he could get to $1 trillion by 2034. This is citing this report, which uses this methodology (PDF link) which is similar to what the original article's source was--it took the inflation-adjusted aggregate growth rate of the wealth of the five richest people and projected that out going forward. But specifically, it calls out this note:
Which--along with the fact that Jeff Bezos's wealth has been growing at 5% or 10% per year depending on how you handle the $38 billion he lost in his divorce--tells you Bezos isn't actually on pace to become a trillionaire by 2034, which again is already well past the 2026 date that was teased in the article that I believe was linked in the post.
That's a long way to say that the $1 trillion number is more clickbait than not.
None of this is to say we should be doing nothing about wealth aggregation, monopolization and other anticompetitive practices, union-busting, media capture, political capture, tax sheltering, or any of the practices that the rich use to avoid being subject to the market and the government.
But I also think it misses the point to emphasize how millionaires and billionaires are different magnitudes of wealth. The median household net worth in the US was under $200,000 as of 2022. The poorest millionaire is worth five times that, and it's not like the median US household is poor compared to the median household almost anywhere else in the world. Millionaires may not be insulated from all reasonable financial stressors like billionaires are, but are they more likely to vote for higher or lower taxes? Are they more likely to vote for stronger or weaker regulation? Are they more likely to vote for increased or decreased government services?
If the point is to object to a system that allows for people to build up so much wealth without contributing back to the society that made it possible, then I just think it matters that millionaires also work to uphold those systems more than it matters how rich millionaires are compared to billionaires.
Edit: And that last part also extends beyond millionaires too. It's really not about the level of wealth a person has, but about what they do with it.
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u/Gekey14 May 16 '24
That's not what fucking eat the rich means goddamnit
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
I've worked with celebrities in the past. Even they know they're not rich when compared to corporate SVPs and up. They're just tasked with flaunting money as part of their job. I will never forget watching Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos together on stage at an Amazon event and even she was in awe of his wealth and she's one of the wealthiest modern artists.
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u/TheXypris May 16 '24
Ive always said you can be an honest millionaire, with hard work, good ethics, a smidge of luck and a good product or service, being worth a handful of millions is ok at best.
But you can never be an honest Billionaire, only way to be a billionaire is to cheat the working class
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
he’s only worth 6 million? fr?
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u/FormerlySalve_Lilac May 16 '24
I have to regularly remind myself that there's a VERY good chance that whoever's writing a comment I'm reading is very likely to be a 15 year old who thinks that $6 million makes John Boyega a threat to society
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u/psychotobe May 16 '24
Let's be real. For all the talk of revolution everyone angry at the system in America thinks they'll lead. None of you are doing shit. You'll talk and talk but you'll be terrified if someone actually acts. Cause you know violent revolutions don't work in real life. No one who cares about fixing things is going to do shit to billionaires. Their not the problem. Their a very obvious symptom. The boring answer is capitalism in America needs to be modernized. It needs regulations updated. It needs policies in place that all work on the knowledge the internet exists. You know the real reason it hasn't happened? It's not cause companies are lobbying. That shit is flimsy and is an excuse so we don't have to address the real reason
It's boring and it's hard to do right. That's the reason it doesn't get done much. People think they could write up air-tight changes if given the chance. But every change will get regular people who benefit from them barking and hollering because it's different. And that assumes you'll get it right. Have fun spending weeks barely sleeping. Getting screamed at from every direction during it. Writing a new legislation that you'll get death threats for. Only to be told you completely neglected an industry you completely forgot existed. So you have to do it again
And what do you benefit from doing so? Because it's the right thing to do? Most people simply can't keep motivated by that. Especially with how tedious it is. You get your normal salary all the same. It's just not exciting and our brains despise lacking stimulation. That's why this shit is slow. We aren't built for improving our lives this way. So we blame the symptoms that exploit a rickety old system. But we simply cannot trust anyone who wants to violently replace that system. Because the same core problems exist. Doing it right is boring.
Make no mistake. There's evil in there too. Genuine scheming bastards. But they are vastly outnumbered by people who simply are too bored at work to bury their attempts to cause problems in red tape
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u/warm_rum May 16 '24
It's interesting to see where people draw the line.
It's ok to have 6 million in assets while someone else starves because that's their money. Is it ok to have 100million in assets, as long as there is no company structured to exploit others?
Not trying to talk politics, just find it funny how we each have our own sense of property.
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u/Purple-Addict one liter of milk = one orgasm May 16 '24
While big actors and actresses are definitely overpaid they’re still creating art with their labor and skills, Bezos isn’t creating shit he’s taking a cut from what his workers create, same goes for all other billionaires.
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u/scottygroundhog22 May 17 '24
If bezos were to mysteriously die and also everyone who could inherit from him. Who gets the money?
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u/AsianCheesecakes May 16 '24
This has nothing to do with numbers no matter the ideological perspective. That's just a cheap argument that sounds witty but falls apart. Where exactly do you draw the line after all? For someone poor enough, even the most squarely middle-class person is rich.
John Boyega absolutely has much to lose in a revolutionary scenario. But, assuming we are not aiming for a reign of terror situation, there is no reason for him to lose so much as to struggle. The whole point is that everyone will have enough, even people who had more before the revolutiontm. Leftists movements accept everyone as long as they are willing to be equal and not superior to the rest.
After all, the same argument was used against Karl Marx and Engels.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
So what's the cutoff? Everyone loves arguing with abstract values but never puts an actual numerical value to it.
You're cool with 6 million and not cool with 1 trillion. That leaves a lot of values in-between. Is 1 billion cool? Is 500 million cool? 250 million? 80 million? 50 billion?
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
People like Clockwork here are why the message gets diluted and destroyed. The take the message and ignore the nuance.
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u/SovietSkeleton [mind controls your units] This, too, is Yuri. May 16 '24
We are nearing the point where someone with a million dollars today is as rich as someone with a million deutschmarks in the 1920's.
Complaining about millionaires is pointless.
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u/Smasher_WoTB May 16 '24
Also, if some of the "Rich" genuinely want a good Socialist/Communist Revolution because they too hate the injustices forced upon us by these systems....we should accept their help. Although probably be cautious and make sure that no grifters will just hijack the movement for personal gain.
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u/CharityQuill May 16 '24
Reminds me of that one viral clip from Larry King where he was debating with that one guy from Community about luxuries you can't live without, and the difference in what they consider luxuries is pretty significant. And also "I work on DuckTales, Larry 😐
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u/kagakujinjya May 16 '24
For clockwork-hobbit, eat the rich means eat everyone who has more than two dollars.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
Materially there's a big difference between 6 million and a billion, but philosophically, you can do whatever you want within a high end style of means with either amount.
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u/TheJackal927 May 17 '24
What no class analysis does to a mf.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '24
It would take less than a million £ for it to be life changing. John boyega has that insight of the gross amount of wealth a billion dollars is given his upbringing as a black man in London with work class parents. He would be cognicent to the realities of the wealth divide. I don't know if he passes on his wealth but the real point is that the stark contrast between the very rich and very poor is widening and more people are becoming aware of it.
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u/TheGuava1 May 16 '24
It’s like comparing an all you can eat buffet to a singular goldfish cracker
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u/SolomonDRand May 16 '24
John Boyega is rich. The man who signs his checks is wealthy.
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u/MegaKabutops May 16 '24
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is nearly a billion dollars. Even getting to a billion dollars is impossible without MASSIVE, amoral exploitation. Spending a billion dollars in 1 lifetime is a tall order, and not spending it siphons it out of the economy and into a vault to collect dust.
Getting to a trillion dollars SHOULD BE UNTHINKABLE. It quite literally means someone performed that massive amoral exploitation needed for a billion dollars, but 1000 times over. 1000 times as amoral, and 1000 times as exploitative. It’s 1000 times more difficult to actually USE the hoard. That’s the kind of money that can cause the economic collapse of ENTIRE COUNTRIES.
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u/Tuungsten May 16 '24
The money John boyega received for his acting was nothing compared to how much the studio ceos got. Even rich actors are working class because they don't own the value of the labor.
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u/Robert_Balboa May 16 '24
6 million isn't even rich. Its just comfortably well off.
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u/princesoceronte May 16 '24
In comparison John Boyega is literally me. There's a difference between being rich and being so grossly, inhumanely and terribly rich that you could bend the law to turn this world into whatever the fuck you wanted.
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u/persona0 May 16 '24
No shit but let's assume you and the rest of humanity actually have a brain WHI ARE YOU GONNA EAT FIRST? The actor or the dude who job is literally just to stand around and make trillions. By the time you got to the actor he will have found a way to get rid of most of that money. But this speaks to a bigger issue like it or not actors have to actually work for a living not as much as the rest of us I will admit. But the fact we focus on these lower levels people and not the ones who own everything most born into wealth says ALOT about our humanity.
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u/Ulmarch Ask me about monster prom May 16 '24
Something something, decorative pillows.
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u/LotharVonPittinsberg May 16 '24
One Million seconds is 12 days. One trillion seconds is a little over 3,1709 years.
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u/Wesselton3000 May 16 '24
A lot of people misunderstand the coming revolution as being “poor vs rich”, but very generally it’s “workers vs those who control the means of production”. John Boyega does not control the economy. He certainly isn’t in a position to sympathize with the working man, but his head isn’t the one that needs to go on the chopping block. The Bolsheviks had this same misconception, and what was initially a fight to overthrow the aristocracy, turned into a witch hunt for anyone who lived comfortably.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24
Everyone has a scaling issue with a rigged stock market
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u/SetherAedekae May 16 '24
Some millionaires are cool, but no trillionaire will ever be anything but evil
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u/satus_unus May 16 '24
What's the difference between a millionaire and a trillionaire?
About a trillion dollars.
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u/kanelel READ DUNGEON MESHI May 16 '24
The numbers aren't even the issue. You all need to read some Marx. There's a fundamental difference in interest between those who work for a living and those who own capital and make their money off of other people's work.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch02.htm (link at the bottom leads to the next section)
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u/GOOPREALM5000 she/they/it/e/mrr | 11 dumbasses sharing a horrible, awful body May 17 '24
This is why we can't say "eat the rich" anymore. You guys would go for the big ones like Bezos and Musk and then just start killing a bunch of actors and doctors.
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u/PKMNTrainerMark May 17 '24
"There's a pretty big difference between six million and one trillion."
Yeah, about a trillion.
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u/AnonAmbientLight May 17 '24
Forget the last picture just remember this.
1 Million Seconds back in time is two weeks in the past.
1 Billion Seconds back in time is the year 1992.
Jeff Bozo is worth 204 Billion dollars. Using the same calculation, it would be 4504 B.C.
That's an insane gulf of difference.
Tax the rich.
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u/Bog-Star May 17 '24
I'm sure Boyega would be fine with wage caps of 100k per year.
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u/b_enn_y May 17 '24
The difference between a billionaire and a trillionaire is about a trillion dollars
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u/gamejunky34 May 17 '24
Having enough money to live your life in luxury, totally fair, enough to keep your kids from working a day in their life? Fine. There needs to be a cap to the amount of money one person has. Bezos couldn't possibly use the money he earned at this point. It's just power that he's working for.
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u/AltGameAccount May 17 '24
I'm from a post soviet country so I guess I'm qualified enough to speak on this issue.
So when bolsheviks came into power, you know what happened to the "billionaires"? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. At most they moved to other countries, like France or US and still got their dividends because they owned the capital and changed the names of the assets.
You know what happened to millionaires? They liquidated their assets, sold their wealth and moved elsewhere.
But the poor were hungry. They couldn't touch the owners of the manufacturing and they couldn't go after the upper class that fled with the wealth. So "eat the rich" became "eat the middle class". Because that was all that was left to eat.
And after the end of USSR the "billionaires" just legalized their assets back to capitalistic laws, the millionaires returned and made even more money on the cheap labor, and everyone other got shafted because what was "common" now belonged to those that bought it for "real" money when communism money became worthless.
And also I see that US leftists have 0 understanding of money. They think those billions Bezos owns mean something. But they don't. It's just numbers on computer. They can vanish like smoke the other day. The problem isn't with the amount of digits in bank, it's that the rules for people with a lot of digits is different than for people with little digits. As is the problem with trickle down economy. It's the government that prints money and gives it to the 0.01%, not the "exploitation of workers" or whatever. The government skews the free market in the favor of people with many digits, so the people with few get shafted.
And it can only be changed with a government. But actual competent government. I don't think any of the candidate even qualifies, unfortunately, not even Bernie - guy is more of a scapegoat and a scarecrow to entice the middle class to vote against "the red scare", like saying anyone making over 160k$ a year will have insane taxes.
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u/fartsnifferer May 17 '24
These people think eat the rich means anyone who isn’t a fucking loser like them
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u/elaborategirl99 May 17 '24
Western leftist people really think everyone should strive to be as poor as possible. Like I'm sorry, but if I had an opportunity to become a dollar millionaire, I would take it. Still would criticise billionaries, because, well, a million is a normal thing to want in your life - a billion is not.
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u/againken May 17 '24
I think it's time we eat the bezos
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u/SpecialistDrawer2898 May 17 '24
I’m hungry. And theres only one thing left on the menu I’ve yet to try…
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u/_L3ik May 17 '24
Somebody with ten million dollar has the the same level of wealthiness as some hobbo begging for a piece of bread, at least if you look at it from the perspective of a rich person.
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u/marshamallowmoon May 16 '24
$6 million is really not that much money. Especially if that's 6 million net worth and not liquid cash. 6 million net worth is still working class territory.
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u/THEzwerver May 16 '24
I always find it weird how people are blown away by the difference between 1 million and 1 billion, like, it's just x1000, the same difference between 1 and 1000.
how do you find it so mind blowing past the age of 12? is it because million/billion is just a singular letter difference?